Facebook Smear Campaign Takes Google War to Defcon 2

Updated: In a bombshell dropped early Thursday, the company behind the PR campaign against Google and its alleged privacy violations turns out to be Facebook, The social network admitted to The Daily Beast that it hired a PR firm to try to plant negative stories about Google and some of its social features. More than anything else, this move shows that the war between Facebook and Google has advanced to a new level — engaging in Washington D.C.-style “dirty tricks” campaigns is a tangible sign that Facebook is scared of what Google could do if it really pours its resources into building something social.

As the Daily Beast describes, word leaked recently that someone was trying to plant negative features about Google, even offering to write an opinion piece and then submit it to major media outlets such as the Washington Post under the name of whichever blogger the giant PR firm — Burson-Marsteller — happened to be contacting. One of those contacted was privacy advocate Chris Soghoian, and he decided to publicize the campaign by posting all the emails. Dan Lyons of The Daily Beast then confronted a Facebook spokesman about it, who admitted the social network had hired the firm.

Large corporations hiring PR companies to plant negative articles in the press about their competitors isn’t exactly a new phenomenon, but this is the first sign that Facebook has taken to using these kind of sleazy tactics against Google. And the sense of desperation that it implies about the social network isn’t helped by the fact that Burson-Marsteller couldn’t seem to get anyone interested in writing about the topic it was pushing so hard — despite the fact that privacy is a hot-button issue. Soghoian has said in an interview that he didn’t think the issue was a very big deal at all.

If anything, the design of Social Circles should be more evidence that Google doesn’t really understand how social works (a topic we have written about many times here at GigaOM). When you go to the page that shows your circle, you see a giant list of everyone you are connected to through any of Google’s properties, and then sub-menus of lists that detail what they have shared through their various connections. It’s about as social as the restaurant listings in the phone book — and is a typical example of the automated and impersonal approach that Google has taken to its whole social effort.

It seems obvious that part of the reason Facebook was upset about this feature had nothing to do with privacy and everything to do with competition, and the social network’s interest in retaining the walled garden around its content, something it has fought with Google about before. As part of its pitch, the company alleged Google was “scraping” data from it and other services to populate the social circles feature, which Facebook said was a breach of its terms of use and could expose data and connections in ways that users had not intended. It even mentioned the furor over Google Buzz and how it revealed people’s connections in ways some didn’t like.

As many have noted, this is a pretty obvious case of the pot calling the kettle black. While Facebook’s PR pitch tries to paint Google as the company that has been besieged by privacy critics and regulators, the reality is, Facebook has been far more exposed to government criticism and sanctions — and potential regulation — as a result of its approach to privacy and its handling of personal data. The social network may have been trying to shift the attention of the press and regulators away from itself and onto Google, but all this campaign has really done is make Facebook look incompetent and desperate, and scared.

Update: In an official statement, a Facebook spokesman said the following:

No ‘smear’ campaign was authorized or intended. Instead, we wanted third parties to verify that people did not approve of the collection and use of information from their accounts on Facebook and other services for inclusion in Google Social Circles — just as Facebook did not approve of use or collection for this purpose. We engaged Burson-Marsteller to focus attention on this issue, using publicly available information that could be independently verified by any media organization or analyst. The issues are serious and we should have presented them in a serious and transparent way.